On Fri, 20 Oct 2017 at 18:53 Aris Merchant < [email protected]> wrote:
> Our economic troubles have gone on long enough. Printing money has > been rejected, despite it being what we had intended to use if we ever > run out. If we don't want to print money, we _need_ taxes. I intend to > write a tax proposal, but first we need to decide on the tax rates. > Income taxes won't really work, as they would incentivize hoarding. I > propose the following two taxes. > > 1. Wealth tax. Every month, X% percent of a persons wealth, rounded up > (where X is a value between 0 and 25 set in a regulation by the > Secretary/Treasuror, and defaults to 10, although these values could > be adjusted) is transferred to Agora. This incentivizes spending > because hoarded money can go away very quickly, but not without > warning. I suggest that the percent be applied only to the portion of > a persons wealth above 10 shinies, and that if contracts are adopted, > the tax should apply to all contracts not exempt from sustenance > payments. > > 2. Inactivity tax. If a person has neither claimed a reward nor spent > money (to limit our measures of activity to things the > Secretary/Treasuror already tracks) in the last month, the > Secretary/Treasuror CAN and SHALL take 80 percent (that number can > change if people don't like it) of all shinies past the first 10 for > Agora with notice. > > Let the debates begin. > > -Aris > Honestly, my experience is that economies that don't allow accumulation tend to not work well. There have been two variations on this that I've seen. Expiring currency (like AP, but as an economic driver) doesn't work because there's little incentive to gain any more than you need. Fixed-supply currency (like shinies) run into the opposite problem, where there is even stronger advantage to accumulate it because the supply can deplete, meaning you need to hoard in case we hit a supply crunch and you want to do things. Beyond that, the economies that I've seen work the best are ones where there is a) an incentive to accumulate b) interesting gameplay and c) useful things to do with money. Right now, we have plenty of a) due to supply limitations, and there's a lot of focus on the supply, but we don't have b) or c). The most interesting gameplay is Estates, of which there are two more to be auctioned, period, and as G. (I believe) pointed out, are never worth spending for one extra vote on one proposal. Comestibles could be the start of interesting gameplay, maybe, but are blocked behind Estates and other timing restrictions, and nobody's actually used them. We're also missing c). The only things you can do with shinies, apart from aforementioned Estates and Comestibles, which ultimately lead to voting power, are do normal gameplay things (CFJs and Proposals and soon, possibly, contracts) and getting Stamps. But the latter are certainly not interesting, and getting more currency isn't inherently useful either for all the existing reasons. Voting power itself is less of a useful incentive, I've found, than you might think. Voting power mechanics are more successful when they operate on an ongoing basis, than one-offs. The only time it's really *useful* to have increased voting power is if you're trying to force something through: it's basically *never* useful to defeat a proposal with it since it can be reproposed once your resources are exhausted. And even proposals you generally want passed are probably not worth spending it on when you could safe for a forcethrough instead later. So one-off voting power is not a great mechanic; it's just a proxy for a win. Ongoing voting power is more useful, and we might even have enough active players right now to make it useful (with a small number of actives, it's very dangerous to make it too easily manipulated). It should still expire (or be reducible by other players) of course, but if a power increase lasts for, say, a month, it's easier to manage and healthier, I think, for the economy. CFJs, Proposals, and other key gameplay are risky to associate with the economy. the more valuable currency is, the harder it is to justify spending it on proposals and CFJs. Slowing these down too much is very, very bad for the game. We don't want to discourage minor fix proposals, or prevent new players from proposing (this has been an issue before), or just overly bottleneck the proposal system on the economy. In my experience, economy for the sake of an economy has never really worked in Agora. We need an economic game, that has complexities to it.
